


The Gift of Forgetfulness

by gwyneth rhys (gwyneth)



Series: All They Had Lost [2]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Cage Fights, Child Loss, Drift Bond, Drivesuit Scars, Eventual Happy Ending, Grief/Mourning, Loss, M/M, Road Trips, Team Hot Dads, The Drift (Pacific Rim), self-punishment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-22
Updated: 2013-10-22
Packaged: 2017-12-30 04:37:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1014179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwyneth/pseuds/gwyneth%20rhys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’ll not be anybody’s fucking tragic hero who lost his son and his best friend and still won the fight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gift of Forgetfulness

**Author's Note:**

> This is a kinda sorta sequel to All They Had Seen and All They Had Lost, but with some small differences in the details.

_No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. -- C.S. Lewis_

 

The pulsing roar of the choppers drowns out Tendo Choi’s words as he steers Herc Hansen back inside LOCCENT.

“I said there’s still nothing, sir. We can’t find anything either on radar or from the air.”

Herc nods, the sensation of slipping down a rock face into thin air, grabbing at anything he could, too strong this time to push down. 

“I’m really sorry, sir. I know you said that you feel something...I get that. The drift bond. And he’s your kid. But it’s been two days now. I don’t think they could have escaped. There was just no time.”

Herc nods again, not even looking at Tendo anymore, just staring at the screen, like there could be a blip on the vast expanse of ocean that would validate the mad tug on that thread that connected him to Chuck, him to Stacker. It doesn’t make any sense, but there isn’t much about the drift process that’s logical.

Eventually he grinds out, “You can stand down.” And he’s done, just like that, standing down himself, walking out the door and knowing with certainty that he can’t stay here anymore. He’ll not be anybody’s fucking tragic hero who lost his son and his best friend and still won the fight. He’s not the PPDC’s poster boy for loss and devastation and sacrifice. He gave them everything, his bill’s been paid, he’s tapped out. He leaves Max with Mako, kisses her goodbye, throws his phone in the bay. He’s not sure he’ll ever see her again.

 

The first place Herc goes is Central America. He figures it’s the least like home, the least like the time he spent in Alaska. He and Stacks had been in Lima once a lot farther south, but outside of that, there’s nothing about Latin America that scalds his heart.

He travels around, staying in cheap rooms likely infested with diseases, but he’s okay with that. He doesn’t sleep much, anyway, and as long as there’s somewhere to piss and some sheets on the bed that don’t smell like mold, he can handle it. They never have TVs or wi-fi; that’s as he wishes it, because he doesn’t want to see his face on the news, or the ceaseless analysis of the breach sealing, or worst of all the endless fingerpointing over the failure of the anti-kaiju walls and the dismantling of the Jaeger program. If he never sees or hears another suit, it’ll be too soon. 

Instead he reads all the books he never had time for in the past; he can always find old English-language paperbacks if he looks. He’ll read anything: science fiction, literary classics, mysteries, even romances, because they remind of him of Angela and they always, always have a happy ending.

He starts with Nicaragua because he still has a lot of U.S. dollars and that’s what they use there. When he lands, he isn’t even moved by the devastation that still marks Managua years after the attack; he’s seen it a hundred times, and it isn’t like this city had anyone he cared about in it. It isn’t like he lost family here. 

Its labyrinthine streets, many of them unnamed, are easy to get lost in, but he tires of holing up in run-down dives eventually. Drinking reminds him of the times he and Stacker went out in the early days of the program, drinking pisswater Yank beer in cheap Alaskan bars until they were nearly legless and so pissed they could hardly find their way back to base. Or nights out with Chuck, when he was finally old enough to drink in pubs, and they actually talked because whatever anger Chuck had over Herc’s bad single-parenting skills evaporated in the alcohol.

Riding buses filled with tourists, or buses filled with people carrying chickens, or beat-up trucks carrying workers to their jobs, Herc answers questions when he’s asked, responds when spoken to, but he doesn’t offer up chatter himself. 

Sometimes they recognize him. Herc doesn’t try to pretend it’s not him, and he still carries his PPDC-sponsored passport, so it’s not like he’s hiding. At least, not hiding who he is on the outside. The inside is another matter. 

On Isla de Ometepe one night, he sits in a bar, the driving beat of disco pounding mental oblivion into him with an assist from the cheap booze, and sees a guy who reminds him of Stacker. Not that he looks like Stacks, he doesn’t really, but he’s got the dark skin and the height and the weight and there’s a similarity in the way he squints and ducks his head. Herc can tell he’s interested. He’d never seen himself as attracted to guys, it was just Stacker he had wanted all the way down the line, but he signals Not-Stacker with a look just the same. The bloke responds and they go out to the alley. 

All they really do is snog and give each other handjobs, but it’s the first sex Herc’s had since right before the end, when he and Stacker were together. 

After he and Stacker had discussed the logistical matters of Herc taking over as marshal, they had spent their final moments together desperate for the touch and scent and taste of each other. The sex had been almost beside the point. When they were done and getting dressed, Stacker had knelt in front of Herc, helping him get his boots on. Herc hadn’t realized it at the time, but they had been having grief sex before there was grief.

There’s none of that tenderness here. When it’s over, and they’re zipping themselves up, the guy says in an accent that puts him somewhere from the Caribbean, “I know who you are.”

Herc responds wearily, “Doesn’t everyone.”

Not-Stacker smiles gently, and puts his hand on the side of Herc’s face. There’s something about the gesture that makes his breath hitch up. “I’m sorry for your loss.” He turns to leave. Herc doesn’t know which way he wants to go: beat the guy to within an inch of his life or embrace him and sob into his shoulder. Something about the bald-faced sympathy, so generous and unadorned, leaves him completely undone. He goes back to his room, wraps his arms around himself, and it all finally comes pouring out, the first time he’s cried since they stopped the clock. He sobs so hard he can’t breathe, and when he’s spent, he rocks himself to sleep.

When Herc tires of the beaches, the jungles, the desert and mountain towns of such perishing poverty he can’t believe his eyes, he moves on to Costa Rica, which is beautiful beyond compare in places, but he can’t appreciate it. He realizes more and more he wants to be away from the coastlines, away from what reminds him of Jaegers and kaiju and shatterdomes.

After a while he runs out of cash, and he doesn’t want to use a card in case anyone tracks him down. Now that his arm’s healed, the easiest thing for quick money is to pick up fights. He’s done it for fun for years, and even though that was a step above this kind of fighting, he’s ready to get down and dirty. While the casual cruelty of animals fighting each other that’s so popular in Latin America disgusts Herc, he has no problem with humans who want to beat each other bloody. The pain just means you’re still alive.

He finds someone who’s running fights, presents himself with his crap Spanish, and the fellow looks him up and down. “You’re a bit old,” is all he says, in perfect, nearly unaccented English. “Australian?”

Herc nods. It’s impossible to read the guy, to tell if he recognizes him.

“Well, that cancels out the age problem, then,” he says dryly, and for the first time in months Herc actually laughs. The promoter runs down the details with Herc, how much he can keep if he wins, and gives him the location of his first fight. For reasons Herc doesn’t understand, he feels lighter, almost clean again.

Herc has to relearn to fight to some degree; he wants to move like he’s in control of a Jaeger. But the muscle memory returns fast, and even without an elbow rocket to amplify a punch or a set of stinger blades to impale someone, he wins. Every time. He always lets them think they’re beating him, because it means they let their guard down, and everyone he fights is at least a good ten years younger than him so they start believing in their own superiority. He knows how to turn their machismo against them. And he wants them to hit him, as hard as they can; it’s his atonement, his exoneration, his sacrifice. He gets hurt doing it this way, sometimes badly.

But it’s never enough.

Once in a while he looks at himself in the mirror longer than it takes to shave or brush his teeth. There are so many new scars to go with his old ones, and the bruises bring them to vivid life. He runs his hands over his drivesuit circuitry scars, the ones Stacker used to trace with his fingertips, his lips, a blind man reading the Braille history of Herc’s combat. He can almost feel it now, still, Stacker’s mustache bristly against his pale skin, his hand covering the scars in ownership, or protection. Herc cherished the chevroned lines of circuitry scars on Stacker’s left arm, the curlicue that rose along his left ribcage and led up his side. They would sometimes trace the lines of each other’s tattoos, a different kind of mark upon their bodies, telling different stories.

In all these months since Operation Pitfall, Herc experiences variations on the same recurring dream: Stacker and Chuck are back, and everyone acts as though it’s perfectly normal that these dead blokes are sitting around with them, talking, eating, drinking. Herc always apologizes for not going with them, for being the last one standing. Chuck just smiles at him with such kindness and understanding that it rips Herc’s heart to pieces. He wakes with wet eyes.

They’re common dreams, he knows -- Angela told him about that sort of dream, which she had all the time after her mother died. He doesn’t remember having them about her, though -- the dreams he had after Angela was gone were of his helplessness, his inability to save her. He always tried so valiantly, and she was so forgiving to him in those dreams, knowing he couldn’t rescue her. But he always let her down. He lets everyone down.

Still, Stacker and Chuck keep calling to him. There’s that tug upon the thread that connected them, slow, steady, and sometimes he hears their voices saying, “We’re right here.” They were all so sympathetic to him in Hong Kong, but he knew what they were thinking: he can’t let it go, the drift bond was too strong and he’s losing his mind. Outside of Raleigh Becket, no one had had to deal with pilots losing their drift partners, being forced to go on without them as if they could live life normally. And they had all seen what it did to Becket, the poor kid. He was the cautionary tale they spoke about in hallways and locker rooms.

He had seen it in their eyes, the desire to tell him that time would make it all better. He knows it’s not true, time never heals -- you just get to a point where you stop talking about the loss, because you know no one wants to listen to you anymore. It’s not that you’ve moved on, but you let others move on; the loss is still heavy on your shoulders and you might look like you’re standing straight, but inside you are buckled over by the weight of it.

Forgetting is a gift, a benevolence that allows you to live out your days without the ones you loved. To step through each day like you want to be here. It’s just not a gift he’s going to be graced with in this lifetime.

 

So he keeps moving, keeps fighting, keeps avoiding. Back up through Nicaragua, to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Belize, until he ends up in Mexico. His Spanish is still pretty bad even after all this time, mostly he can handle asking about rooms, getting directions, and ordering food. 

He’s wandering around the plaza of a small town in Veracruz when some fight groupies come up to him. They’d seen him fight the night before, and they are very, very interested in him. At first he tries to push them off, but then he thinks, why the fuck not, two girls for the price of one, and for the first time since Isla de Omatepe he actually feels randy. They go back to his room and the girls happily work their magic on him while he lies back, puts almost no effort in at all. But he keeps thinking about Stacker.

One night in Alaska they’d gone home with some Jaeger flies, one for each of them, something that shocked him since Stacker didn’t go that way; he wasn’t a monk, exactly, but he wasn’t given to casual sex with just anyone. Well, neither was Herc for that matter, but they were just pissed enough that night, high on a successful test of the newly redesigned pons connections. 

They were both in the living room, Stacker with his girl on the sofa, Herc on the floor with his, and all he could do was watch Stacks. The way the muscles in his back and his arse moved as he thrust into her, the sweat that sheened his forehead. Stacker had eventually glanced over at Herc to see him looking, and it was then he knew they would be lovers. Stacker’s eyes burned into him with such intense desire that Herc had come so hard his jaw ached from clenching, watching Stacker watching him.

Because he’s never been one for nameless, empty sex, Herc asks the girls their names; he’d like to ask them how they came to watch cage fights in grimy buildings on the outskirts of town, but he doesn’t have enough Spanish. He settles for sticking his face between Teresa’s legs, because he’s always loved the smell and feel of pussy. And Teresa does the same for Yolanda and they’re just one big happy fucking threesome. At least, until after the girls both come, when they languidly trace his drivesuit scars with tender fingertips, kiss them with wet mouths. He doesn’t speak enough of the language to understand all of what they eagerly chatter about, but then he hears the words _Jaeger_ and _piloto_.

He snaps up off the bed, grabs their clothes, and hands them to the girls, telling them to go. They’re confused; the admiration and respect in their eyes sours to petulance and anger, but he just needs them to go.

After they leave, Herc throws his duffel on the bed and digs down to the bottom. There are two things he’s carried in it, across continents and countries, but he’s never looked at them since he left Hong Kong. 

The first is Stacker’s marshal’s wings. Before they went to the shatterdome bay, Stacker had pulled Herc’s hand up, put his badge into Herc’s palm, folded his fingers around it, and told him, “You’re in charge. I know it’s the end of the line so it’s a shit promotion, but you’re marshal now, and I’m just your Ranger.” He’d put the badge in his pocket and kissed Stacker, right in front of the crew nearby, without caring what they saw or what they thought. Of course, no one even noticed, since everyone had probably figured out they were more than just brothers in arms some time ago.

The second item is Chuck’s cap. He has it folded up inside a silk satin cloth with Striker Eureka’s nose art of Max with the missile between his teeth embroidered on it, a gift from an appreciative Melbourne resident after Spinejackal. The cap still smells like Chuck: the spicy soap and shave lotion he used, and the faint whiff of machine oil. 

All the wasted time when he wasn’t a father to Chuck. Because he bought into the bullshit of what it meant to be a man, an Australian man in particular, focusing on his job and his mates and football matches and all the shit that in the end no one talks about wishing they’d done more of. 

He’d met the girl of his dreams at uni, married her, had a kid, become a pilot. Everything he thought was the right path to take. When he rotated back from Afghanistan, K-Day came along and all that bullshit he’d thought so important disappeared into the rubble left behind by a monster. There was no do-over.

The parenting had always been something he thought best left to Angela, so it had come as a shock when he discovered a different kid had grown up in place of the son he’d thought he had. One who’d changed his nickname to Chuck from Charlie because he liked it when Herc’s Yank military friends called him that -- and more important, it wasn’t what his father wanted to call him. Angela had always cautioned Herc that their son needed more from him, but he’d thought the odd day at a match or teaching him to work on motorbikes was enough. The day they lost Angela, Herc had let his son cry his shirtfront soaking wet. But rather than show Chuck his own grief and despair, he’d just shut down. 

His son resented him for not being his mum, for not even having been his father all that much, for knowing he would have to live with only Herc to help him grow up, and that wasn’t much help at all. And Herc had just been...a pilot, a soldier, a warrior. Not ever much of a dad.

Herc had raised his son inside a war machine, and then didn’t know what to do when he turned out to be a weapon.

Angela would have been so disappointed in him. The worst part might even be that Herc has always sort of understood Chuck’s resentment, because he had his own crosses to bear. No one should have to make the decision to save either their wife or their child, should have to endure that child’s rage when they were stuck with the wrong parent. So they each carried their own bitterness, trying all the time to act like father and son, loving and hating at the same time.

All he has left of his relationship with his son now is this cap, and he bunches it up in his fists and thinks of the boy he loved before he became a weapon. Herc doesn’t believe in an afterlife, but he stares at the cap like it’s a neural bridge to Chuck, and he asks, “Why didn’t you take me with you? We should have been together, you could have carried the weight, I know it. The only thing wrong with me was my shoulder. Everything else...I could have gone with you. Even in the end I let you down.”

Curling up on the bed, he holds the cap and Stacker’s badge in his hands and tries to sleep.

 

Eventually Herc gets tired of fighting, of the blood and the plasters and the stitches and the loose teeth. He’s gone as far north as he can in Mexico, where he finds himself at the border at El Centro, California. He contemplates heading back south, catching a flight somewhere very far away, maybe Cape Town, or doing something truly mad like following the Road of Bones in Russia. But in the end he crosses the border.

Everyone who looks at his passport stares hard at him, disbelieving. The way they peer at him seems more intense than usual, but he doesn’t want to ask any questions because that might mean finding out answers he doesn’t want to hear. 

It had taken him a long time to get used to the fame that went hand in hand with being a Jaeger jockey; Chuck had taken to it like a duck to water, but for Herc it was uncomfortable, especially because it was a worldwide celebrity, not just a local-hero type thing. After the disaster with Mutavore, coming in to rescue Sydney after Striker Eureka -- the whole program -- had been abandoned by the powers that be, he’d catapulted into the ranks of household name. He’d joined the PPDC because he wanted to help, because he could help, and because he’d lost someone he loved; the fame and adulation were burrs under a saddle to him. He’d never understood how Stacker handled it, tried in some ways to model himself after Stacker in that regard, but it was not Herc’s style at all.

So he’s unsure now if the stares are because of his history with Striker, or because of Operation Pitfall, or because he has lost everything and he’s everyone’s icon of kaiju war sacrifice. But he doesn’t ask, just walks through the border, takes a bus into town, and then finds where he can catch a coach to somewhere farther inland. There’s a naval air facility still here, and it’s tempting to visit, but that would just bring up memories of a better time, when all he did was fly planes and come home to his family. 

He doesn’t want to wait at a depot, with so many people likely to recognize him. Instead, he sits by the side of the road outside town and waits until a bus comes, he doesn’t care where to, and rides out, uncertain if he’s happy to be back in the States or if this is the worst decision he could make.

At one point the bus pulls up to a transport café, and everyone gets out. He buys himself some shit food wrapped in plastic, something to drink, and turns to find an older woman staring at him. She looks like she’s someone’s abuela, short and plump and her long grey hair tied into a braid that’s wrapped around the back of her head. Her stare is not admiring or friendly, so she’s definitely not a fan. Herc gives her a wan smile, ducks his head, trying to go around her, when she lets loose a tirade at him that he can’t understand -- but he picks out the Spanish words for _son_ and _home_. Her grandson, Herc assumes, comes up to them.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he says, with a little head-nod of deference to Herc. The boy tries to take her aside, but she just keeps glaring at Herc.

“What’s she so pissed off about?” Herc asks, honestly curious, since it’s the strangest reaction he can ever remember. Everyone’s getting back on the bus except them.

The boy flinches, barely noticeable, but Herc catches it. The boy glances sideways, then says, “She...she wonders why you’re not home with your boy. She thinks you should be with him.”

Gobsmacked, Herc takes a step backward, his heart pounding in his chest. For the first time since the breach was closed he feels alive, anger coursing through him, the blood in his veins molten. Is that what people think of him, that he ran away when he should be sitting in the shatterdome, weeping over his lost son and his friend and keeping vigil over their watery graves? It would almost be comical if it wasn’t so insulting and infuriating. 

“Why would she say something like that?” he asks, though he wants to punch her in the face. He can’t remember ever having a reaction to someone like that, especially not to a woman.

The young man frowns and furrows his brow, the look on his face the one anybody wears when they’re dealing with a very stupid person. But before he can say anything, the bus driver barks out an order to get on if they’re going, and the two scurry away. Herc is left choking on his rage over their intrusion into his grief; he doesn’t get on the coach.

He walks away, duffle slung over his shoulder, just heading down the highway until he gets to the town proper. After getting a little sleep and a shower at a motel, he decides to buy himself a motorcycle and head out for the Rockies. 

He finds a Harley-Davidson in need of some repair, which he’s more than capable of doing, so he gets it for a good price. It’s the same model Chuck had. They had fixed that one up too, in Alaska, and brought it back to Sydney when he was routed back there for the PPDC. If something was American, Chuck preferred it. He would take the bike out when they were off duty, with whatever Jaeger fly he was currently seeing. Herc wouldn’t hear from him for days.

The one time they really seemed to come together outside of a drift was when they worked on something mechanical. So he hopes that Chuck would approve of the bike. This time, Herc decides, instead of being beaten down, he’ll fix things up. The ceaseless training for piloting had left him strong enough to do just about anything, even after the beatings he took fighting. That was another time he and Chuck were in sync outside the drift -- you had to be strong, certainly, to run the giant mechas, but it was more about endurance, fortitude. Chuck actually seemed interested in learning from him when it came to physical training, all eager eyes and willing ears.

So he starts taking odd jobs, moving from place to place, getting paid under the table. Things have changed so much in the States since K-Day, and now they’ve changed again, as some of those who’d moved inland -- usually the wealthier -- slowly trickle back toward the damaged coastal cities. One day Herc realizes that he’s drifting back toward California himself.

Despite the months that have passed, Herc still feels that tug upon the thread that connected him to Chuck and to Stacker. Every once in a while, in a dream, one of them tells him to come back home; he’s just not sure where home is anymore. 

If he could, he’d stay in the dream. In it he can see and hear and feel Chuck; he’s turning his head on the pillow to see Chuck standing by his bed, saying, “Come on, old man, put your arse in gear. We’ve a mission,” and throwing his clothes at him. He’s listening to Chuck singing along to the old blues music he loved so much.

In the dream he’s inside Stacker and they’re moving together, a fever burning so hot it makes him dizzy, the taste of Stacker’s mouth and the purr of his voice carrying him off to the sky like he’s back in his plane. He’s listening to Stacker say his name and it sounds like the most beautiful word ever spoken.

Over days and weeks, he works. Herc can tell some recognize him, some don’t, or if they do they don’t show it. But it’s odd -- the ones who clearly recognize him act so strangely, with a caution and anxiety in their bearing even while they have the eye-glimmer of a fan. It’s something he’s never seen before, and he doesn’t know how to process it. He’s slightly curious about what it is they want to say to him, but not curious enough to let them tell him.

The road carries him eventually to Oakland and he realizes, or finally admits, that he’s been heading to Oblivion Bay. Herc knew that people had left flowers, mementos, gifts of thanks there for years, but he wasn’t expecting to see the shrine that the place has become. The Jaegers are buried underneath so many flowers the place smells like a perfumery, piles of handwritten notes and signs, and items that were meaningful to someone, somewhere, which they needed to share with the shells of these saviors.

He sees a handpainted picture of Striker Eureka and kneels down to touch it. He loved Striker, loved the planes and angles of her body, her fighter’s stance. His and Chuck’s personalities had been poured into her in the design phase, their love of boxing made manifest in her bearing. And her weaknesses have been branded upon his skin.

In a far corner Herc finds a segment of Coyote Tango, and he brushes away flowers to touch the cold metal. Maybe there’s a ghost of Stacker still left in it, the neural connection that flowed from human to machine left imprinted upon it the way it had imprinted itself upon Stacker’s body.

The drift is fragments, sense memories of sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. There are patterns of color: Stacker was always blue green gold, a dark ocean flowing and crashing around him; Stacker once told Herc that he was like a sunset. Herc’s hand on the remnant of Coyote doesn’t bring anything to him, and he taps it a few times, saying goodbye.

Dozens of people swarm about the site, children climbing on the metal, and there’s an older white man who seems to be leading a tour. If there was ever a place where Herc would be recognized, this is it, so he pulls his cap down lower on his face, hunkers into his jacket, and listens at the outside edge of the group. He can’t hear everything, but one thing he does hear pierces his heart: pieces of Striker have washed ashore in various countries. They hope to acquire some and put them in a museum they are currently working to fund. 

He can’t breathe, can’t feel his hands and feet, can’t hear anything else but the pounding of blood in his ears. Stumbling away from the group, he fights his way past people to a small hill on the edge of the site and sits down, puts his hand over his eyes, and cries. 

After a while, when there aren’t any more tears left in him and he’s just sitting there with his arms on his knees, forehead pressed against them, the salt taste on his lips like seawater, a shadow passes across him and he looks up. The man who’d been leading the tour is standing there, holding out a hand, and he says, “Marshal Hansen. It’s an honor to meet you.” He salutes with his other hand.

Herc recognizes one of the tattoos on his forearms as Army Airborne Rangers. But it’s like his mouth is made of the same metal rusting here in this graveyard, he can’t get it to work, so he just stares up at the bloke. He looks to be even older than Herc had first thought, possibly late sixties, early seventies.

“My name’s Bill. I’m very unofficially a guide here; I work for a group that’s trying to get funding for a museum and to make this a national park.” He holds the hand out again, and this time Herc takes it, lets Bill help him up. “I saw you come over here and I just wanted to thank you for your service, for everything you did for us. I know this must be...it must be hard.” He gives Herc the sympathetic head tilt that Herc knows all too well from the many times he’s lost people. “Could I buy you a cup of coffee? There’s a diner not too far from here.”

Herc nods, says, “I can follow you.” He runs his hand over his face, trying to wipe away the tear tracks.

They end up at a restaurant a few miles away, and he realizes this is the first time he’s sat down with another human being like this. Bill orders some coffee and peach pie for both of them. It’s so good and so simple that it almost makes Herc lose it again. While he eats, Bill keeps up a steady but pleasant stream of talk, about Oblivion Bay and how the funding is going, about the way people need to show their support for the humans and machines that saved their world.

When he’s finished the pie, Herc finds his voice. “Where did you serve?”

Bill laughs. “Oh, I’m old -- I was in Vietnam. A Ranger of a different sort than you. But you were a flyboy before the kaiju war, weren’t you?”

“I was.” 

“You’ve been willing to put yourself on the line most of your life, it seems.” Herc just shakes his head. Everyone wants to make it a bigger deal of it than it is. “Heroes usually won’t admit to being heroes.” Bill chuckles, and what would normally make Herc want to punch someone doesn’t bother him.

“I never wanted any of that. Just to do the right thing, help people out. It’s over now.”

“Is that why you haven’t gone back to them? Because you’re afraid of the attention?”

Herc shakes his head, confused. “Back to the PPDC? I’d think you could guess the reason I don’t want to go back there.”

Bill squints at him. “Son, don’t you know?”

It’s like that thread connecting him to Chuck and Stacker gets yanked hard all of a sudden; he feels weightless and hollow. “Know what?”

“Your boy, the marshal. They’re alive. It was the biggest news since you closed the breach.”

A silvery, cold shiver runs down his spine, in through his gut. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or throw up.

“Here,” Bill says, the concern in his light hazel-brown eyes, the color of a lion’s mane, adding to this feeling of falling down, down, the way you drop when you disengage transport, straight into the deep water to the bottom of the sea. “It’s been months; these are some of the earliest stories.” He slides his mobile across the table.

Herc flips through the reports, most of them breathless tales of the heroes who’d died closing the breach having been found alive but in critical condition, badly burned from the blast. Mako and Tendo are quoted often. In a few, it’s mentioned that Marshal Hansen has taken a sabbatical and is out of communication range, but they are working on getting the news to him. The past few months swim in front of Herc’s eyes; he hears the woman from the coach berating him for not being with his son and he blushes with shame.

Bill puts his hand on Herc’s and Herc doesn’t try to shake it off, the touch is warm and comforting. “They got out because of the failsafes you designed.” Herc looks up at him, bewildered. “The news said that when they built Striker Eureka, you had them put in automatic ejection capsules -- as soon as the failsafe switches were pressed, you were up and out. Faster and rougher than the escape pods, and risky, like an ejection seat in a jet.” Now he remembers. Now that tug on the thread that’s plagued him since the moment they detonated the payload makes sense. 

“But the blast would have...” He can’t think of Chuck and Stacker like that.

“That’s what they’re working on. It’s hard to know what to believe. I’m sure they don’t tell the media what’s really happening. But all the best and the brightest have gone there to help. Everyone wants to help them.”

Herc sits back in the booth and holds up the mobile with a shaking hand. “May I make a call?”

“Of course, son, of course.”

Herc takes the phone outside, stands in the car park. The sun is going down, but it’s still warm and beautiful here, a clear sky overhead and what was once a blast zone returning to life. He looks up, heaves a ragged sigh, and dials Mako-san.

When she answers and sees his face, her smile lights up like the California sun. His stomach twists and turns, an eely thing in there trying to make its way out. Herc’s body is so weak, so tired.

“Marshal,” Mako says gently, “please come home.”

It’s a perfect day.

**Author's Note:**

> This title also comes from The Wind in the Willows. I guess it's a theme? The story was inspired by a number of photosets from Max Martini's movie Street Warrior.
> 
> Since the first story was written before the writer started retconning things all over the place, there's no real mention of Herc's brother here.
> 
> I think there will be another part.


End file.
